


Travellers on an olden road (with all the baggage of our days and years)

by TheAnswerIsDawn



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Serenity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2042199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAnswerIsDawn/pseuds/TheAnswerIsDawn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody in this life has keepsakes, mementos, trinkets from the past that they just can’t throw away, and Serenity’s crew is no different. They keep them in different places of course, under a bed, on a shelf, in one of Serenity’s many nooks, and where they keep them says almost as much as what those treasures are. But whatever and wherever they are, they invariably exist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Travellers on an olden road (with all the baggage of our days and years)

**Author's Note:**

> (Title from 'Travellers' by Runrig)

Mal’s box is nothing special, a wooden postal crate from some dustbowl planet at the ass-end of the ‘Verse, but it has been with him since the war, since those first desperate days turned loose from the POW camps into a world that no longer made sense, and he had clutched it to his chest the same way they had both clutched their guns in the dog-hours of the night. Back then it had been all he had left beyond the shirt on his back and Zoe at his side, and his memories and grief and the tattered remains of his faith had rattled hollowly within their wooden confines until sometimes he wanted to scream. Now he keeps it in the bottom drawer of his desk, the one that only he has the key to, and when he takes it out the rattle is softened by the gentle hum of Serenity’s engines and Inara’s voice, muffled through the bulkhead as she laughs at something with Kaylee in the galley.

It is fuller now, too, memories of Serenity soothing the gaping wound that Shadow left behind, and Mal runs reverent fingers over each item when they spill out onto the mattress of his bunk.

There’s a packet of letters from home, numbered and tied up with string and old wax paper that’s cracking along the folds where it has long since dried out. It’s an incomplete correspondence; many of the letters never made it out of the valley and others are too damaged for him to pick out his mother’s careful print, but they are one of the few parts of her he has left, and he guards them closely.

Beneath them is a slim volume of poetry from Earth-That-Was, a mother’s last gift to her son before he stepped on board a transport ship and watched the Christmas lanterns gleaming in the street dwindle to pinpricks as the planet fell away. He’d carried that book into every battle he fought, wrapped for safekeeping in a spare shirt at the bottom of his pack, and in return it had carried him through the comfortless hours until he could quote every verse by heart. He recites them sometimes still, staring out into the Black from the co-pilot’s chair, Wash’s dinosaurs bright spots of colour in the corners of his vision. _Remember me when I am gone away, gone far away into the silent land…_

His fingers clench tight into a scrap of red fabric as he tries to force the image of Wash’s corpse from his mind, but the scarf in his hands is its own reminder, the last piece of his uniform irrevocably blood-stained from a last-ditch attempt at a tourniquet that came too late to save Private Simmons. This, as with many things, he is surprised survived destruction in the POW camps, but then the Alliance hadn't cared much what their prisoners owned, had trampled them so hard under their grey boot-heels that they had assumed that none of them could ever rise again. But even the Alliance bastards couldn’t take the sky from them, and if on the bad days Mal sees that scarf as a reminder of everything they fought for, everything they lost, then on the good days he can remember everything they have gained since that moment. And today has been a good day, for all that thoughts of Wash creep in when he least expects them, and as he listens to Zoe join in the laughter in the galley, something painful in his chest unknots itself a little further. Letting out a long breath, Mal tucks the scarf out of sight beneath the poetry book, and reaches for the next item.

He spares little thought for his dog-tags, _SGT. REYNOLDS, MALCOLM: 099-836-5-4112_ , but nestled next to them in their own little tin are a number of River’s origami pieces, horses and flowers and spaceships all made up in sparkling paper like little sweet wrappers. His favourite is a miniature replica of Serenity, too fragile for all but the most delicate of touches, that she pressed into his hand one night at the table as he sat with Inara trying to balance the books. It had put a smile on his face then, drawing his mind away from the sad truth that the numbers just didn’t add up, and he smiles again now as he admires the way the silver paper shines in the dim light of his bunk. River has been calmer since Miranda, as if seeing it has allowed her to sort out her own memories from the jumble in her brain, and Mal takes her new-found lucidity as a good sign.

There’s one other thing in the tin beside origami, and Mal’s eyes soften as he slides out a carefully folded sheet of rice paper, decorated with inked cherry blossoms and a love poem in Inara’s practised calligraphy. He’d thought he was dreaming the first time they kissed, after he’d fled to her shuttle hardly daring to hope, and sometimes he thinks he might still be. But if it is a dream then it’s not one he wants to wake up from, and so he keeps her gift close and hopes that their love lasts as long as the ink, because he doesn’t think he can live with himself if she leaves again.

The box is almost empty now, except for that annoying rattle that still has the power to set his teeth on edge, and he reaches into the far corner to where his grandmother’s cross holds lonely service for the dead and damned. The chain is missing, the cross itself tarnished and bent from where he threw it away in the valley, and for a long time he’d thought it lost forever and not cared much besides. But it had turned up without a word on his desk one evening with a bottle of cheap Blue Sun whiskey, and he’d spent a sleepless night roaming the gangways until ships-morning rolled around and he let the job distract him. He’d not spoken a word to Zoe, but come evening he’d set out two glasses on the table in the galley and they’d drunk to old times until he passed out. Mal had awoken fully clothed in his bunk with just the slightest memory of how he’d gotten there, and the cross had stayed in the box where it rattled and irritated the jagged edges of his faith. And then the Preacher had arrived.

Mal sighs at the thought of Book. He’d slipped the cross into the Shepherd’s baggage when he left to preach the word on Haven, sure that Book would know what it was, but once again Zoe was the one to return it to him, pressing it into his hand in the silence of the Bridge. So now the cross rests back in his box, the last thing he takes out and the last he puts back in, and if anything has come close to reconciling him with its presence it is holding little Hope Washburne while Inara tucks herself in against his shoulder and the rest of the crew laugh in the background, and Serenity slides onwards through the Black.

Yes, he has keepsakes. They all do. And one day, he hopes, they will have more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This probably won't be updated often - I've got Zoe's chapter half finished but beyond that I don't expect I'll get onto the other characters for a long time.
> 
> The poem is 'Remember' by Christina Rossetti


End file.
